Toward the end of this essay, I’m going to tell you about the time 30 years ago when Jim Harrison — the singular American poet and novelist — stole my date. This happened at a literary festival in Key West when I was 25 years old. Worse, I had flown there from East Lansing, Michigan, with nearly the sole purpose of meeting Harrison, whom I idolized.
“The Mysticism of Money”: that was the brassily alliterative title of a 1922 essay published by Harold Loeb in Broom, the magazine he co-founded and bankrolled. Contemporary American culture, Loeb observed, had positioned commerce as its new religion. Europeans made money as a means to old-school ends; Americans had started to make it for the sake of making it. This was strange and unsettling, but the upside was an emerging metropolitan culture of startling energy — as Loeb put it, “vigorous, crude, expressive, alive with metaphors, Rabelaisian.”
George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love.
America’s power to wage war hangs more on the sex life of the greater sage-grouse than you might guess. You wouldn’t want to overstate the case. If you were to rank determinants of wartime readiness, the greater sage-grouse’s amorous entanglements would probably place behind things like defense outlays and the upkeep of stealth bombers. But those entanglements do play a small role, and that’s still more than most imagine. It is certainly more than I did until only a few years ago. Then I took command of a cavalry troop in the U.S. Army and lost my innocence forever.
The world is worried about fascism. Across the U.S. and Europe, conservative, nationalist, or populist movements are on the rise. The rhetoric is intense. Many people, including politicians in power in the U.S., have likened Donald Trump to Hitler. We’ve seen what appeared to be a Nazi salute from a major tech mogul. Other tech guys fell in line — they want to keep doing what they’re doing, after all. Not all the people who voted for the current administration are bigoted, misogynistic racists, of course, but some of them are. Most of them — or at least the ones I have contact with — just wanted better wages and cheaper groceries.
The calls came in around 10:40 on the night of August 25, 1955. Thomas McGuinn, the dispatcher on shift in the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, had been on the job for three years, but had never encountered anything like this. Sgt. Ralph Weber and patrolman Ernest Nehrer were watching a “big, bright, round” object above the Fernald atomic plant — where uranium ore was processed for nuclear weapons.
William James would like you to imagine that you are stuck on a mountain ledge, “from which the only escape is by a terrible leap.” Now for the good news: if you have faith that you can jump across, then you will. But let yourself brood on the odds of success and “you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss.”
Ruyan Meng’s second novel, The Morgue Keeper, follows the exhausted, ultraresilient Qing Yuan, a morgue attendant in Mao’s China who runs afoul of the vengeful state while investigating the mysterious death of an unidentified woman known only as “number 19.” The book is harrowing in the strict etymological sense, not in the cloudy uprooted sense with which the word is often deployed: it left me feeling like I’d been scraped over by a plough’s tines. Cut into, yes, and a bit sore, yes, but also more open, more fertile of mind.
I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing American flag-themed apparel, let alone flying the flag in public. I go out of my way to make sarcastic, biting jokes about America’s hypocrisy on national holidays, and scoff at my parents — loyalists to the Democratic Party — when they repeat the well-known bit about how “despite its many flaws, this is still a great nation.” Yes, I’m a millennial. How could you tell? Like many of my peers, I’m prone to a deadly combination of pessimistic cynicism and utopian idealism.
A few years ago, I attended a Christmastime service at an Orthodox church in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was beautiful and the clergy welcoming and gracious. The icons decorating the church’s interior were indeed evocative, and the long, slender candles parishioners placed in sand added to the atmosphere. As I was walking back home I encountered a young man who had been there too, and explained that he was a convert. “In Orthodox Christianity,” he gushed, his eyes widening, “it’s like the Enlightenment never existed.”
There’s a channel on Stingray Music, an online streaming service based in Canada, called All-Time Greatest Hits. A typical five-song set goes like this: Billie Eilish followed by Foreigner followed by Gladys Knight & the Pips followed by Rihanna and ending with the Lovin’ Spoonful. Contrary to the passivity that streaming often cultivates, All-Time Greatest Hits demands the opposite. The mood and the genre and the era change constantly. Nothing is put on a pedestal. Everything played is treated equally.
You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers.
To be fair, it’s not like Patricia Lockwood doesn’t warn us. “I was having a Protagonist Problem,” she declares. “I could not move, or make anything happen.” Of course, by the time the reader of her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, reaches this acknowledgement midway through the book, they’re likely already aware of both the “protagonist problem” at the heart of the novel and the failure of Lockwood’s trademark self-referential humor to solve it. Credit to Lockwood for her self-awareness, but the authorial disclaimer is too little, too late.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, “—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But the poet was missing an element. The last two centuries have seen the binary coupling evolve into a ménage à trois. A hot newcomer, Transgression, has joined the hallowed pair as the transcendent purpose and valorizing principle of art, bringing with it a perverse polycule of aesthetic virtues — shock value, envelope-pushing, norm-busting, taboo-shattering, bourgeois-épatering — without which the modern literary canon, and certainly its cover copy and promotional spin, would be seriously bereft.
At the turn of the 20th century, the city became a source of concern, something to study, something to ponder. On the back of the Industrial Revolution and the concurrent disappearance of older, more rural forms of life, millions of people in what is called “The West” began to move to urban centers. With Empire and imperialism at their height — recall that the Berlin Conference, where the imperial powers divided up Africa, happened only in 1884 — the city expanded and became the metropolis.